Is it conceivable that we, the British, might one day in the not too distant future get over our obsession with booze? Catherine Gray thinks so, and she has statistics to back her up. Apparently 43% of British women and 84% of British men want to drink less; spending on booze, fags and drugs has recently fallen below £12 a week “for the first time ever”
;and a recent survey found that 43% of Brits had been teetotal over the past week. Only 3% of millennials say that drinking is “an essential part of socialising”, and there has been a “40% rise in millennials choosing to be teetotal”
.Gray concludes from this that booze is soon to go the way of our formerly beloved fags: “In 50 years’ time, our grandchildren could be saying ‘I can’t believe people used to drink for fun?!
Even if Gray’s use of these figures is often a little loose (below £12 a week for the first time ever? What exactly is a millennial? A 40% rise compared with when?)
it’s hard not to feel that she’s on to something. An air of cool hovers around sobriety at the moment, just as it does over veganism and clean eating; Gray points to the rise of sober club nights such as Morning Gloryville,
and the proliferation of sober blogs such as Hip Sobriety (hipsobriety.com) and Girl and Tonic (girlandtonic.co.uk). Celebrities from Brad Pitt to Damien Hirst have spoken out about their battles with booze and the pleasures of new-found sobriety. Suddenly all that Cool Britannia binge-drinking and drugging looks terribly passé.
